by Mark Dawson
The male agent reached down and helped Hussain to his feet. He guided him to the fuselage and helped him place his feet on the stairs that led inside.
‘Thank you,’ the woman said as she turned on her heel and followed her colleague into the jet. The pilot came out to retract the steps and close the door. The bowser detached its hose and drove back in the direction of the terminal building.
They were left alone. They got into the car. Kelleher offered to drive. Pope was tired and didn’t demur. As she turned the Passat around and accelerated away to the gate, Pope heard the Gulfstream’s engine fire up and watched as the plane slowly began to roll towards the runway.
‘Back to London?’ Number Nine asked.
‘Yes.’
They had another long drive ahead of them. As they started south, he looked through the wire-mesh fence and out onto the runway. The jet streaked towards them, launched itself into the air and roared overhead at two hundred feet. It banked steeply to port and disappeared away to the south.
‘Poor bugger,’ Snow offered.
PART THREE
Chapter Thirty-Two
Isabella killed the engine of her Kawasaki and rested it on its side stand. She unlocked the brand new door and pulled it up, then went into the dark space and disabled the alarm. The place felt secure now. She was pleased with the work that she had arranged and ran her fingers across the cold steel lockers.
Today was a big day.
The delivery was arranged for the afternoon. The ancient white Vauxhall Astravan turned off the Route de Safi and bounced across the uneven approach road to the row of industrial units. The driver drew to a halt and got out with a clipboard in his hand.
‘Sabrina Atika?’
‘That’s right,’ Isabella said.
‘You need to sign here.’
She took the clipboard and signed where he indicated.
‘What?’ he said when she held on to the clipboard.
‘Can you move them inside, please?’
‘You have to. I don’t do that.’
‘I’ll give you an extra three hundred dirham if you do.’
The man grunted his assent and went to the back of the van. He opened the doors. The space was crammed to the roof with wooden packing crates of various sizes. The man took one of the larger ones and hauled it out. It slid off the back of the van and crashed onto the ground.
‘Careful!’ she said.
He cursed under his breath. ‘What do you have in there?’ he asked.
‘Equipment.’
‘Heavy equipment.’
‘Stop moaning,’ she said. ‘You want your money—or don’t you?’
They moved the crates from the van into the unit. Isabella paid the driver his extra money and watched him get into his van and drive away.
It was just past dusk, and she paused outside the unit for a minute, just letting a sense of the place sink in. The neighbouring properties were empty. Some of them were vacant, as advertised by the signs of the realtors that were fixed to the doors or the walls. Those that had been busy earlier were empty now, their occupants packed up and returned to the city. The occasional car hummed along the Route de Safi, headlights snapping on as the desert approached, but there was nothing else.
She pulled the drawstring to turn on the light, shut and locked the door, and set to work.
Isabella had packed the equipment from the garage into the crates, protecting it with balled-up newspaper and old blankets. The crates came in several different sizes. There were those that were long and thin and others that were square. She had sealed them carefully, driving nails through the lids so that they could only be opened with deliberate effort and not accidentally.
She had a claw hammer on the floor, and using the end, she pried off the lid of the nearest box and stood it against the wall. The inside was stuffed to the top with newspaper; she cleared it out to reveal an M-15 ArmaLite flat-carbine. She pulled it out. It had the M4 collapsible buttstock and forged lower receiver, the mid-length hand guard and gas system, a chrome-lined sixteen-inch heavy barrel, a rail front gas block and a flash hider. The chamber had elongated M4-style feed ramps for more reliable feeding with heavier bullet weights. It was an excellent weapon. Beatrix had shown her how to use it.
Her mother had left her an impressive armoury of weapons. She pried open the lids of the other crates and started to sort through the contents. There were semi-automatic pistols, rifles, submachine guns, shotguns. She took out a TAR-21 bullpup assault rifle and an MK249 with ten one-hundred-round soft-pack ammo bags. There was a Mossberg 500 shotgun and an M110 sniper rifle with bipod. Flashbangs. Knives, frag grenades, night-vision goggles, a radio set, and boxes upon boxes of ammunition of all different calibres.
She arranged them carefully in the lockers: the rifles went into one locker, the revolvers and semi-automatics in another, the shotguns in a third. She matched the various calibre ammo with the relevant firearms. She opened a box of 9mm rounds, and they glittered in the light.
She intended to break each firearm down so that it could be cleaned and maintained, but it was late by the time that she had unpacked, and she decided that she would start that task another day. She was pleased with what she had done. She felt good about the weapons. They were safer here. She didn’t know how she could make them much safer.
She opened the door, switched off the light and stepped outside. It was cold now. She put on her leather riding jacket, pulled down and locked the door, got onto her Kawasaki and rode back to Marrakech.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Pope visited the dead drop every day for the next three days. On the third day, the chalk mark on the seat indicated that there was something waiting for him. He walked on to the tree, waited until the path was clear and then retrieved the small slip of paper that had been left inside the nook. It gave a code that he knew referred to a motorway service station on the M25, a date and a time. The location was correct, but Pope deducted a day and an hour from the time to find the correct details for the rendezvous.
It was today’s date. He had three hours to get there.
He drove to Junction 9 of the motorway and came off at Cobham services. There was a branch of Costa Coffee, with a number of tables arranged outside. Vivian Bloom was sitting at one of them. He was wearing a knitted waistcoat under his tweed jacket, despite the warmth in the air. His tie was knotted loosely and bore a stain just before it disappeared into the waistcoat. He looked particularly ecclesiastical today, Pope thought. Tweedy and donnish.
Pope sat down next to him, and the spook shook his hand.
‘Good afternoon, Control. Can I get you a coffee?’
‘No, sir. I’m fine.’
A man passed them. Bloom waited until he was gone and then leaned forward. ‘Well done.’
‘No problems?’
‘None,’ he replied. ‘It was very well done.’
Bloom was thinner than Pope remembered him. There was a lilt in his voice, a sibilance to his consonants that gave him an effeminate aspect that Pope did not remember from before. He did remember the bookishness, the way he steepled his fingers when he was thinking, the sense that he was being assessed when Bloom fixed his rheumy gaze on him. He remembered the thin lips that whitened when he smiled, the mousiness, the same apologetic loyalty to decisions that he professed to find ridiculous. He remembered, too, the obvious sharpness of his wit and counselled himself to keep that in mind. Bloom had been a player in the intelligence community for many years. Pope was reminded of an old joke that had attached itself to the man during the Cold War. In the case of nuclear attack, it was said, the only things that would survive were cockroaches and Vivian Bloom.
‘Where’s Hussain now?’
Bloom chuckled. ‘You know better than to ask that, old boy.’
Pope knew enough to have a pretty good guess. The CIA had black sites on the territory of several compliant states, and given the limited range of the Gulfstream that had taken off with Hussain, he wo
uld have put money on Vilnius in Lithuania or Ain Aouda in Morocco. The location was irrelevant. He would have been taken to an anonymous cell in an anonymous building. As far as Hussain was concerned, he could have been anywhere. But Pope doubted whether it would have been something that would have had much of his attention. The treatment he would have been receiving would have been the main thing on his mind.
‘Did you get anything useful?’
Bloom took a pipe and a packet of tobacco from his pocket. He reached into the packet with his thumb and forefinger and drew out a wad of tobacco. ‘He has been very cooperative,’ he said as he pressed the tobacco into the bowl. ‘He’s confirmed that he was responsible for radicalising the three boys. His mosque ran a conference last year and flew in a handful of jihadi clerics. Two of them have been banned from Britain since then. Shouldn’t have been let in at all, you ask me, but there you go. The other one’s on the US no-fly list. Hussain admitted that he met Bashir and Hakeem at the conference, and that Bashir introduced him to Aamir. He spent the next six months grooming them.’ He put a match to the bowl and puffed until the tobacco was alight.
‘What about the others? The shooters?’
‘He says they had nothing to do with him. He says he just supplied the bombers. He says there’s another man.’
‘You believe him, sir?’
‘Our CIA friends believe him. They seem confident that he wouldn’t be inclined to lie to them. You know how thorough they are, Control. I think we can rely on their assurances.’
‘The organiser – does Hussain know who he is?’
‘Unfortunately, no. Only that he’s still in the country and that there will be follow-up attacks. The word he chose was that there would be a “wave” of them.’
‘That’s not very helpful.’
‘No,’ Bloom said, puffing on the pipe. ‘But it does get a little better.’
He laid the pipe on the table and took a printout from his briefcase. He gave it to Pope. It was a photograph of a man and looked like some sort of promotional shot. The man was wearing a pristine white dishdasha topped with a red-and-white keffiyeh. He was handsome, with a well-trimmed beard and clear, laughing eyes. He looked confident. He looked like money.
‘His name is Salim Hasan Mafuz Muslim al-Khawari. Bit of a mouthful, I know. Prominent Sunni cleric, naturalised Lebanese, partly resident in the UK until last year, lived in a big place in Mayfair. His family made their money in oil, he inherited it and now he’s as rich as Croesus. Hussain says al-Khawari is the financier behind the attack.’
A family of four, laughing and joking, strolled past. Pope waited until they were out of earshot.
‘Were we watching him?’
‘Of course we were, but we didn’t have a clue he was anything other than an Arab playboy who comes over here to get the things he can’t get back home: booze, whores – you know. Hussain says he’s heavily involved with the Kuwait Clerics Union, which we know has channelled tens of millions of dollars to ISIS and other jihadi groups in Iraq and Syria. He’s made a big PR play about a big collective fundraising trust he set up for Syria involving a host of Kuwaiti charities. But Hussain says that’s all bollocks. The money’s been sent to fund the caliphate, and a million of it was earmarked to help those boys blow up the House of Commons.’
‘You think it’s credible?’
‘There’s always a financier. The Qatari who provided ‘financial support’ for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before 9/11. The Saudi prince who paid for training and equipment for 7/7. I don’t think it’s beyond the pale at all.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Switzerland. His European businesses are headquartered there. He’s not usually in the same place for long. Tends to live in hotels. But his family is there. His wife – one of them, anyway – and his children.’
Bloom put the stem of the pipe back into his mouth and inhaled. Pope felt that he was being assessed.
‘Sir?’
‘How close were you to the third bomber?’
‘Very close.’
‘What happened to McNair? You saw it, didn’t you?’
‘I was very close to that, too.’
‘How do you feel about that afternoon?’
It was a strange question. ‘If you’re asking if I’m all right, I am. I’ve seen a lot of death in my time.’
‘But not like the bomb? The civilians?’
‘Are you asking whether I feel angry? I do.’
‘Surely more than anger, Control?’
Pope found the questions irritating, and he spoke with sudden heat. ‘Are you asking if I want to be involved in making sure it doesn’t happen again? Yes, sir. I do.’
‘You’ve said it yourself, Captain. You’ve seen a lot of death. And in my experience, most men have a tolerance for that which cannot be exceeded without consequences. Episodes. Breakdowns. Your friend Captain Milton is a perfect example of what can happen if a careful watch is not kept on these things.’ He smiled benignly. ‘I suppose what I’m saying, Captain Pope, is that I want to be quite sure, if we are to continue with this, that you have the mental capacity to carry out my instructions. What comes next has the potential to be rather more difficult than abducting a one-legged, one-eyed man from his bed.’
Pope found his watery gaze discomfiting, but he held it. He saw the street outside Westminster station, the man with the rucksack on his back, the certainty in his stride as he walked into the middle of the crowd of shocked onlookers; he saw the flash as he scrubbed himself from existence; he saw the flayed skin and the blood; he smelled the cooked flesh. He put firmness into his answer. ‘Let’s stop with this charade, sir. I haven’t reached my tolerance yet. You don’t need to worry about that.’
‘You are happy to continue?’
‘I am.’
Bloom nodded at his conviction. ‘I believed that would be your answer, but you’ll understand why I need to be sure. We are already in choppy waters. Conditions will get worse before they get better.’
For God’s sake, thought Pope, I’ve told you that I’m in. Get on with it. ‘You want me to have a word with him?’
‘I’d like that very much, but I’m afraid al-Khawari will be rather more difficult. It isn’t Moss Side. His security is rather more effective than a couple of sleepy bobbies. The direct approach is unlikely to be successful.’
Pope had the impression that he was being very mildly belittled. ‘So?’
‘We need evidence of his involvement. Interrogating him would be best, but we think that will be too much to ask. There’s the problem with him being on neutral territory, of course. You know how the Swiss would play it if we took him. That prized neutrality.’ He shook his hand as if waving away an unpleasant smell. ‘We need to go about things more quietly. We need to get into his computer.’
Pope frowned. ‘So give it to Group Three?’
‘Yes, of course, we’ve tried that already. Our friend is very particular with what our specialists describe as ‘network hygiene.’ Very particular, and lavish with the funds he spends on it. I’m told access is possible but that it needs to be done in situ.’ Bloom smoked his pipe for a while and then said, ‘You’re familiar with Cottonmouth?’
‘Yes. I’ve used it.’
Group Six had perfected a wide range of devices that could be used to bug the IT equipment belonging to persons of interest. Cottonmouth was a particularly neat piece of kit that they had invented. It was a USB plug bugging device and was disguised either as a keyboard’s USB plug or as a type of USB extension cord that could be connected unnoticed between a peripheral and the computer itself. It could send and receive radio signals and made it possible not only to monitor the bugged computer and its compromised network but also to send commands to both. They were small and so discreet as to be almost undetectable unless you knew to look.
‘Wonderfully clever piece of kit,’ Bloom said, ‘but we need someone to go in and fit the device. And that isn’t going to be easy to do. I’m open to ide
as.’
Pope felt himself being sucked deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole, but he was committed now. He knew he wouldn’t be able to pull back. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to. There was no guarantee that the Firm would be able to find the jihadist who had promised Hussain that there would be additional operations. More would be killed. This might be the best chance they had to track him down.
Bloom looked down at his pipe for a while. Pope puckered his lips for a moment before settling on a recommendation. ‘Surveillance first. Let’s see what we can find out. Everyone has a blind spot. You just have to know where to find it.’
‘The same parameters apply. We’ve never spoken about any of this.’
‘I know, sir.’
‘And if you get into a sticky situation, you’ll be on your own.’
A driver wandered a little too close to their table.
Pope waited until he was gone. ‘I’ll need to communicate with you online.’
‘Visit the dead drop before you go. I’ll leave instructions.’
Bloom stood. There were no goodbyes. He turned and set off into the car park.
Pope waited for him to leave. A police van sped along the motorway, its lights flashing and siren wailing. A helicopter buzzed overhead, a mile to the west. There were two armed soldiers at the entrance to the services. Again he noticed that London felt as if it was under siege. Pope watched as Bloom’s sleek, expensive car pulled out into the sluggish traffic and headed onto the slip road.
He put on his sunglasses and started the walk back to his car.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Pope decided that he would conduct the surveillance himself. But since a target like al-Khawari would be difficult to track alone, he pegged Number Nine and Number Twelve to assist. It wasn’t just a question of numbers. Hannah Kelleher was from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment and was the best undercover surveillance operative that he had; it made sense for her to be included. Snow, on the other hand, needed confidence. Number Twelve had tried to brush off the mauling that he had received at the hands of the steering committee, but Pope had seen through it. It was not surprising that he felt bruised. Add that to the guilt he would be feeling over the death of Fèlix Rubió, and it was important that the soldier got back on the job as quickly as possible.
